The
Los Angeles Superior Court’s Northwest District wrapped up a “crash settlement
program” Friday having resolved 360 cases after two weeks of work by judges and
volunteer attorneys, judges reported.

Some 250 lawyers put in a day of work each
beginning Oct. 20 at the civil courthouse in Van Nuys, Judge Richard Wolfe
said. The volunteers were recruited by the San Fernando Valley Bar Association.

Northwest
District Supervising Judge Sandy
R. Kriegler said the volunteers worked in pairs on a roster of about 800 cases
identified by the court’s civil case judges. Wolfe coordinated the work on
behalf of the court, Kriegler said.

“He’s
done all the heavy lifting and he deserves all the credit,” the supervising
judge said.

SFVBA
President James R. Felton of Greenberg & Bass in Encino said the volunteer
lawyers held settlement conferences for two to four cases in the morning and a
similar number in the afternoon. If a settlement was reached, one of the
court’s judges was available so that a record of the terms could be made in
open court, Felton explained.

Wolfe
said the success of the effort by the Valley Area Settlement Team, or VAST, in
producing case resolutions exceeded his expectations.

“If
anybody would have told me we would have got that many I would have wondered if
they were on anything,” he commented. He added that even conferences which did
not result in settlements may in many cases have brought about significant
progress, increasing the potential for resolution during the coming weeks or
months.

Judge
Bert Glennon, who coordinated the VAST program when it was first implemented in
the middle 1990s, said the court’s judges worked for about a year to plan the
two-week effort this time, identifying cases and trying to clear their
calendars as much as possible of law and motion matters and trials.

When
the VAST program was first tried, Glennon explained, the two Van Nuys court
buildings housed separate superior and municipal courts, both of which were
involved in the effort. Now the courts are unified and one of the buildings is
devoted to civil matters while the other handles criminal cases.

The
courts then worked on a master calendar bases, which Kriegler characterized as
“more of an attorney driven system.” He initially had doubts about how well a
crash program would work under the current direct calendar system, in which
judicial supervision of the progress of each case is much more intensive, the
supervising judge said.

“It
turns out we still had plenty of room to operate,” Kriegler observed.

Another
difference between the original VAST and this year’s version, Glennon pointed
out, was that the just-concluded effort involved a day devoted to each of three
specific types of cases: medical malpractice, construction defects, and
employment. On those days, Glennon said, the SFVBA was able to provide
volunteer attorneys who were specialists in those complex litigation areas.

Felton
said the success of the program could lead to its repetition on an annual or
biennial basis, and Kriegler said the court would welcome that if the SFVBA was
able to recruit the volunteers required.

“The
program doesn’t work without them,” the supervising judge declared.

He
added that the impetus for trying VAST again came last year when three of the
court’s 12 general jurisdiction civil courtrooms had to be shut down in a
budget crunch. That required assigning about 100 additional cases each to the
remaining nine courtrooms, Kriegler noted.

While
VAST did not succeed in reducing caseloads in those courtrooms to their old
numbers, it did “move it toward” that level, he said.

The
VAST effort wound down as the two Van Nuys court buildings were briefly locked
down because of a shooting outside them. Kriegler said that for about an hour
no one was allowed in or out of either building.

The
lockdown did not affect the settlement efforts going on inside, the supervising
judge said.